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Why Married Women Love Olivia Pope

I teach a writing class on Thursday mornings, all of my
students are moms, most of them are married. We gather, we have some tea, and then we get to work. Inevitably, someone brings up Olivia Pope,
then the chatter ensues about her style. I don’t mean just her creamy
off-white pantsuits. After all, these women are bright and opinionated. What
they can’t get enough of are Ms. Pope’s righteous, detailed monologues.

Having only seen the show once, when a friend of mine was on
it and Kate Burton stabbed her husband with a letter-opener splattering blood
on the chintz-covered lampshades and furniture in her office, I was curious to
see what made my students such devoted admirers of “Scandal.” It didn’t
take me more than two episodes to figure out what my married friends were so
enthralled with.

Olivia Pope, God bless her smooth self, is always
right.

I’ve been married for 13 years, and the one thing I may
finally be getting is that, if you want to stay in a real marriage and be happy
about it, feeling you are right and constantly expressing it is an impulse you
have sacrifice like the biblical baby lamb at the altar. Even when a
spouse is 5,000 percent right, it serves no one in any marriage to
launch in to a four-minute monologue laying out all the ways he or she is right
and their life partner is wrong.

One of Olivia’s most watched moments in
the history of the show is her speech “Earn Me.” It’s one where she
rips in to the President (the leader of the free world and bad boy, played with a
devastating inability to overcome the lure of Kerry Washington’s high glossed
lips, by Tony Goldwyn) for thinking he can just summon her when he feels like it
and have her back. Here’s an excerpt: "I am not a toy you
can play with when you’re bored or lonely or horny. I am not the girl the guy
gets at the end of the movie. I am not a fantasy. If you want me, earn
me!" When
Ms. Washington is done, you half expect the grips on set to break into
applause. Given the popularity of this speech, credit “Scandal” creator Shonda
Rhimes with hitting a nerve for women everywhere.

I started imagining what would happen if I launched in
to a similar Pope-inspired diatribe at my husband, say if I showed up late to
something trying to get everyone out the door. Or if my car was ever towed
again, like it was last month, because I was racing to swimming class with my
youngest and didn’t read a sign right — a mistake that wasn’t exactly met by my husband with warmth. Of course, he was under pressure at work, work that
pays our mortgage. But in the world according to Olivia that would be
completely beside the point! Which is precisely why we love her. When he
called back to find out where the car had been towed, I’d hit him with a
Pope-inspired soliloquy. First I’d snap my neck to clear my perfectly blown
out hair from the receiver, then I’d hit “accept.”

“What? Why are you calling me back? Do you think you
can just call me back and, because you are concerned for 15 seconds that perhaps
your wife and your son are stranded in Hollywood, I am supposed to just bow to
you! Well I am not bowing to you, that is not happening! I have been up since 6 a.m. I have packed lunches, which means, because how would you know this,
stuffing oddly shaped fried items in to a small baggie, a baggie I have ordered
online because the regular baggies, the easy ones that are right there on the
shelf, are causing global warming which, if you are a mother and you send your
child to school with them, you can just wait to be ostracized by the earnest
green moms at the next function where you show up and volunteer your time to
make stupid hand-puppets made of felt and covered with glue and glitter — both
of which get stuck under your nails so you are peeling it off along with some
of your skin for weeks after. But you wouldn’t know anything about the
humiliation of volunteering and then feeling disliked when you get there would
you? Because you work for a paycheck, a pretty good one, and they buy you lunch
where you all sit around talking about current events or your next job or who
is screwing whom, which is actually highly interesting lunch conversation when
you compare it to a discussion of whether the fifth-graders will enjoy laser
tag for their graduation party or how many chaperones we need to get for their
dance, which I am NOT saying isn’t important, it is important, but I am saying
that stimulating isn’t a word I would use to describe it, so you can understand
after a long day of being trapped in relentless traffic why a person might
misread a sign that looked like some kind of hieroglyphics from the a cave, why
a person under pressure to get her child in to his bathing suit amidst 40 other
screaming children without being late for a class that only runs 30 minutes — so
if you are late what is the goddamn point?— that she might misread this sign and
then come out of the YMCA when it is dark, holding her seven-year-old son’s
hand and not seeing her car and feel, powerless and scared and FRUSTRATED!! I am
not a fantasy, I am a real live mom doing the best I goddamn can every goddamn
day, and if you can’t find it in your heart to respond to my normal, human
mistakes with compassion and love, then you will have to find someone else to
warm your bed at night!”

Honestly, in a real marriage? Not so helpful. More
like draining and provocative — but not in a good way. Look, I never had an
affair with a married man, but I’m thinking that for people who do, always
being right about the whole thing being wrong must be intoxicating. Hence, all the entertaining passion between her and The Pres. But what makes Olivia
herself so addicting for women is that she’s right about everything. I now
completely get the vicarious thrill of her righteous monologuing and saving the
day. Even more than her inexhaustible supply of silk and cashmere and
steamy stollen kisses, I can’t think of a bigger fantasy for a wife and
mother. Fantasy being the operative word, because in a non-televised
marriage, one you are hoping will run for many, many seasons, this approach
does more harm than good.

I doubt I am the first to declare this, but
Olivia Pope is a 21st century female superhero, which is fabulous. I’m just saying
there’s a reason why she’s single.